movies

‘I won’t be back’: Schwarzenegger quits Celebrity Apprentice after one season

Forrmer California governor blames Donald Trump for reality shows recent poor performance, saying: Its a very divisive period now

Arnold Schwarzenegger said on Friday that he will not return as host of The New Celebrity Apprentice, and blamed Donald Trump for the reality shows recent poor performance.

The former California governor said he would not mind working with NBC and producer Mark Burnett again, on a show that doesnt have this baggage.

Schwarzenegger replaced the president as host of the show, but Trump remained as an executive producer. The president taunted Schwarzenegger for the shows recent poor performance in the ratings, even mocking him during an address at the National Prayer Breakfast.

The show, which wrapped up its 15th season last month, averaged fewer than five million viewers per episode. That was lower than any other incarnation except for a 2010 Trump-hosted edition without celebrities. It was also the most poorly rated edition of the show among the youthful viewers NBC cares most about, the Nielsen company said.

Even if he were asked to host the show again, Schwarzenegger said, he wouldnt want to do it.

With Trump being involved in the show people have a bad taste and dont want to participate as a spectator or as a sponsor or in any other way support the show, he said, in an interview with the Empire website.

Its a very divisive period now and I think this show got caught up in all that division.

After Schwarzeneggers debut in January, Trump wrote on Twitter that the show had been swamped in comparison to the ratings machine, DJT.

Schwarzenegger shot back, saying on social media that he hoped Trump would work for the American people as aggressively as he did for his ratings. The actor, like Trump a Republican, did not endorse Trump for president and said he would not vote for him.

When The New Celebrity Apprentice ended its season last month, Trump tweeted that Schwarzenegger did a really bad job as governor of California and even worse on The Apprentice, but at least he tried hard.

NBC had no immediate comment about whether the show would return with a new host.

For perfomance reasons we use Cloudflare as a CDN network. This saves a cookie "__cfduid" to apply security settings on a per-client basis. This cookie is strictly necessary for Cloudflare's security features and cannot be turned off.